Blog for March 2018

Daily Links

Daily Links

Microsoft hasn’t included iOS 11 split screen support, so you can’t run the browser alongside another app. Passwords will roam across Edge on Windows 10 to iPad and Android tablets, and the reading list and reading view features are both supported too.

Google is really going with the contradictory name of "Chromebook tablets" for these devices. Notebooks (and Chromebooks) get the "book" name from the fact that they have hinges that allow them to open and close like a book. When you take the hinge away and make a tablet, it's not really a "book" form factor anymore.

Researcher Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications.

Daily Links

The world so badly needs more people that try and be a little bit like Mr. Rogers. If you don’t know who he is, you need to spend a week watching his show wherever you can find it. If you do know who he is, you should definitely try and find this movie in theatres.

Daily Links

This song generates a musical sequence using EEG brain wave data of an anonymous female pediatric patient with epilepsy. The song examines the periods before, during, and after a seizure. The goal is to give the listener an empathetic and intuitive understanding of the brain's neural activity during a seizure.

The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer.

XOXO is the much-loved culture and tech conference in Portland, organized by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan. After skipping 2017 with the chance it might never return, the conference is back in full swing for a September 6-9 event!

The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of Firefox this week—release number 59. It treads further down the performance improvement path that November's Quantum release began, but its most interesting feature is a quality-of-life one: Firefox 59 users can prevent some websites from popping up requests to send notifications to your device or from requesting to use your camera unexpectedly.

“Wikipedia’s content is also freely licensed for reuse by anyone, and that’s part of our mission: that every single person can share in free knowledge,” Wikimedia says. “We want people all over the world to use, share, add to, and remix Wikipedia... At the same time, we encourage companies who use Wikimedia’s content to give back in the spirit of sustainability.”

Friday, March 16th, 2018

Daily Links

Daily Links

An August 2015 exposé by Billboard quoted an unnamed major-label executive who claimed playlist adds were being sold for “$2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists.”

Google is banning ads related to cryptocurrency from its vast advertising network, effective in June. Cryptocurrency markets reacted negatively to the news. The price of bitcoin is down about 6 percent since the Wall Street Journal first reported the new policy early Wednesday morning. Other major currencies, including Ethereum and Litecoin, are also down modestly.

"Using the Creative Commons zero license (CC0), the third most visited museum in the world has essentially turned over a trove of high resolution images to any individual or business who wish to use, copy, or modify them for their projects—with no conditions attached."

Tuesday, March 13th, 2018

Daily Links

"Wildcard certificates are only available via ACMEv2. In order to use ACMEv2 for wildcard or non-wildcard certificates you’ll need a client that has been updated to support ACMEv2913. It is our intent to transition all clients and subscribers to ACMEv2, though we have not set an end-of-life date for our ACMEv1 API yet."

Along with going open source, Ghostery is also announcing two new, simpler ways it plans to make money. The first part of the new business model will be Ghostery Insights, a paid, premium product designed for academics, journalists, researchers, and anyone else curious about the webpage and tracker ecosystem online. The second part will be Ghostery Rewards, a kind of affiliate marketing system that users can opt into.

Starting today, artists can post videos, GIFs, images and good old-fashioned text to a prominent space inside their search results' "Knowledge Panel," the blocked-off area containing photos, a bio and links to areas like YouTube and Spotify. Artists can control the customized content on a dedicated site for verified people, places and things. Fans will be able to tell if the updates are legit by the blue checkmark next to the artist's name.

Daily Links

Highlights include enhancements to the notification panel, indoor positioning, and support for iPhone X-style notches. This developer preview only works on the Pixel 1, Pixel 1 XL, Pixel 2, and Pixel 2 XL.

A game where you are the boss of CosmoCast, a corrupt, post-Net Neutrality ISP. Your job is to "boost, throttle or disconnect" people based on their activities, working at breakneck speed to keep the packets flowing in the way that optimizes the internet for your shareholders at the expense of your users.

Google and Disney announced today that all U.S. Disney theme parks and resorts are on Google Street View. They feature 360-degree panoramic views of attractions from Disneyland to the ESPN Complex to the water parks.